Brief

This was a two-week project about creating a mobile application that enhances the experience of listening music. Our team focused on how the physical environment affects the experience of listening to music.

What is StarPlayer?

StarPlayer is a music sharing platform which lets users share music and get recommendations from other people’s playlists based on location, time and weather. People’s behavior in listening to music is highly related to the environmental context. StarPlayer lets users see the music that was shared in the location where they are at and also access other people’s playlists with similar taste.

Background

People tend to listen to happy songs while sitting on a patio of a coffee shop during a sunny day. People listen to energetic songs while running beside the Han River and listen to calm, peaceful songs while working late in the library. Sometimes, you want to listen to songs that the local people listen to while traveling on a vacation.

Moreover, people have always wanted to share these experiences or emotions. Back in the days when Walkman and CD Players were very popular, people recorded a list of their favorite songs on a tape or a CD to share it with people they love. Nowadays, this has shifted to sharing music through Youtube or Facebook.

Our team became interested in these different aspects of listening to music and decided to explore this idea by creating a connection between physical space and music.

Role

Prototyping, UX design and function flow

Group Work

Research, brainstorming, user testing, presentation

Duration

Two weeks with a team of three

Description

Design Workshop, Professor Soojin Jun
Yonsei University, Spring 2014

Research Process

Research and Synthesis

Our team conducted field research using various design research methods such as online survey, 1 on 1 interviews and fly-on-the-wall observations in various places.

First, we visited different places to observe how music people listen to changes, based on the physical space. Through the online survey, we tried to find out people’s general thoughts on the relationship between music and location. Also, we wanted to hear about people’s different experiences with sharing music. We dived more deeply into each question in the survey through interviews.

Through research, we learned that,

(1) The atmosphere and the characteristic of the physical space are highly related with the music people listen to.(2) People want to get music recommendation from people relevant to the current atmosphere.
(3) People have the desire to share music and get recommendations from people with similar taste.

Primary Persona

Based on our research, we created a primary and secondary persona for our service. The following is the primary persona that we created. We created the story as a day in the user’s life to see the frustrations, needs and goals according to the context.

User Journey Map

The most interesting insight we learned from our research was that there was a high need for getting music recommendation relevant to their taste in music. There were roughly three ways people listen to new songs.

(1) Get recommendations from friends with similar taste in music.
(2) Listen to songs played in coffee shops or restaurants.
(3) Listen to random songs using music streaming mobile application.

Our team made a journey map for the third case to find the pain points the users feel when they try to find new songs and add them to the playlist.

We were able to find that the main problem was that they feel frustration while trying to search with limited information. Other than broad criteria like artist or genre, there was no way the user can narrow down the songs based on their taste. Therefore, they had to repeat the same process of listening to the song for a short while and deleting it from the playlist if they don’t like it. This frustration gets bigger if they don’t find anything after this process.

Concept

Our concept for our service was location based music sharing mobile application. Through listening to songs that are shared at a certain location, users are able to listen to songs that are more relevant to their surroundings and taste. Also, users can access each other’s playlist so that when they find someone with similar preference in music, they can listen to each other’s song without any effort.

Key Interactions

1. Music Check-in

When a user shares a song at a certain location, other users who are in the area can listen to it. All the songs shared by the users who visited the same place in the past are accumulated.

We were able to find out that users felt a strong connection between their physical location and the songs they listen to. Also, there is a high probability that people in the same location(coffee shops, restaurants) will have some similarity between them. Since users want to get recommendations from people with similar taste, we thought that this function will help users find new songs that they like and also recommend songs that go along well with their location.

2. Sharing Playlist / Music Friend

The second function is being able to browse through other users’ playlists. We decided to set this as one of our main functions because we saw the users needs for finding people with similar music preference and being able to get recommendations from them. Once the user finds a song they like, they can look into the playlist of the person who shared it and listens to new songs. They can also choose to become connected as “Friend” to share more songs in the future.

Information Architecture

Experience Starplayer

Final Prototype

Learnings

Since this was a two-week project, our team didn’t have much time. Through this project, I practiced rapid brainstorming and prototyping.

Limitation was that due to the time constraints, our team wasn’t able to perform thorough user testing.